TRUST Research Experience for Undergraduates

The TRUST Research Experiences for Undergraduates (TRUST REU) is a nine-week summer program in Cybersecurity, Privacy and Trustworthy Systems, established to promote access to graduate education among undergraduates who have been educationally or economically disadvantaged and who may not have exposure to the academic environment of a research university.

The goal of the TRUST REU program is to increase the level of diversity among students entering graduate programs in computer science and engineering by providing research opportunities under the supervision of a faculty member and graduate student mentor. Program objectives are:

To provide students with preparation to become research scholars

To stimulate serious consideration of graduate study

To increase the number of successful underserved applicants able to enroll in graduate school

Program benefits include:

Approximately 9-10 weeks of research

A research stipend of $4500

A round-trip travel stipend up to $600

A double room in a residential hall

A subsidized GRE preparation course

Special consideration will be given to applicants who have shown potential for success, but may have had limited access to undergraduate research or other academic opportunities. Upon completion of this program students will be better prepared and motivated to apply for graduate school admission.

SUMMER 2015 TRUST REU

Campus Location: Cornell UniversitySponsoring Faculty: Hakim WeatherspoonProgram Dates: June 7 - August 7, 2015Preferred Skills: Programming in CResearch Areas: Sonic (Software-defined Network Interface Card)Project 1:SoNIC BoomState-of-the-art networks require state-of-the-art methodologies to understand and secure them, and use them efficiently. Our SoNIC-enabled (software defined network interface) networks are a crucial enabling step. Informed by the improved understanding, control, and flexibility given by being able to control the entire network stack in software, we expect to develop better protocols for moving large quantities of data securely and reliably in modern networks. In this summer project, we investigate end-to-end system dependability, focusing on the flow dynamics introduced by a state-of-the-art 10 Gbps wide-area network carrying a variety of extremely steady data streams. We intend to show that the burstiness introduced by this network causes endpoint buffer overflows and resultant packet loss, and that the degree of loss can be far more severe than would be expected purely on the basis of the packet chain lengths. Further, we would like to investigate ways in which data transfer protocols, like TCP, could be modified to remedy the problem. The issue is important: enterprises ranging from geographically dispersed scientific projects that move large data sets, to cloud computing applications shipping data between data centers (or directly to end-users), are building networks of the sort we used in our studies. As a result, a substantial community faces the performance issues we investigate, and would benefit from the remedial steps we would research and suggest.

Project 2:Research in Cloud Storage Diversity:The increasing popularity of cloud storage is leading organizations to consider moving data out of their own data centers and into the cloud. However, success for cloud storage providers can present a significant risk to customers; namely, it becomes very expensive to switch storage providers. In this summer project, we make a case for applying RAID-like techniques used by disks and file systems, but at the cloud storage level. We argue that striping user data across multiple providers can allow customers to avoid vendor lock-in, reduce the cost of switching providers, and better tolerate provider outages or failures. We will work on a project called RACS (redundant array of cloud storage), a proxy that transparently spreads the storage load over many providers. We will build and evaluate a prototype of RACS system and estimate the costs incurred and benefits reaped.